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MN Farmers Organize, Voice Support for Proposed USDA Rules

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Friday, August 20, 2010   

REDWOOD FALLS, Minn. - Livestock and dairy producers from across Minnesota met in Redwood Falls this week to voice support for recently proposed USDA rules aimed at restoring market competition and strengthening protections against price discrimination.

Meatpackers and corporate livestock and poultry producers have condemned the proposed rules as a contradiction of established legal precedent, and also lobbied to extend the comment period. But Adam Warthesen, federal farm policy organizer with the Land Stewardship Project feels that, for far too long, large corporate farms have influenced policy, suppressed prices and crushed competition for small farmers.

"It's a way of doing business that, in Minnesota, has left us with fewer farmers. It's left us with greater consolidation in the livestock industry, and it's left us with farmers receiving less of the retail dollar for the livestock they sell."

Warthesen explains the USDA proposal would clarify and strengthen enforcement of anti-trust rules originally set by the Packers and Stockyards Act of 1921, rules he says have not been followed. He believes the change would end preferred treatment that some packers give to favored feedlots. New rules would also restrict packer-to-packer sales of livestock, which are sometimes used to avoid competitive bidding.

Darwyn Bach has been raising corn, soybeans and hogs in the Boyd area since 1986. In the early days, he says, he had four or five packers or buyers to whom he could market his hogs. Today, there's one — or two, if he's willing to drive extra miles.

"So, it's not a very competitive bidding process for our hogs anymore. We kind-of have to take what they offer us."

Bach says he's seen more and more meatpackers sell hogs to each other, and cites a USDA daily slaughter report for Minnesota this week. It shows more than 19,000 hogs were sold on the open market, while more than 20,000 were sold by packers, to packers. (The report is online at www.ams.usda.gov/mnreports/lm_hg201.txt.)

According to Warthesen, Bach's story is a common one. The comment period on the proposed rules was due to close August 23, but the USDA has extended it through November. Warthesen says he'd like to believe the extension was meant to give farmers more time to comment — but he doesn't.

"There's an underlying strategy here by the giant meatpackers to try to kill this rule. They want to kill this rule because it threatens the way that they've been doing business for years."

The proposed rule can be found at www.gipsa.usda.gov. The Land Stewardship Project has collected farmers' comments and is taking a group of Minnesota representatives to a Department of Justice and Agriculture Competition Workshop on August 27 in Fort Collins, Colorado.




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